* Roohit helps you save and share Web site clippings
Like you I’m constantly finding interesting and useful stuff on the Web. Sometimes it is just a single sentence, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a whole page. The problem is how to save and share these clips. Today’s focus, Roohit Instant Web Highlighter is potentially one of the more interesting clipping and sharing solutions I’ve come across.
What’s so promising is that it is simple and requires no installation and has some interesting aspects of social networking built into its functioning. Currently the service only works with Internet Explorer but Firefox support is promised soon.
The simplest way to use Roohit is when you are on a page that has text you want to highlight; you just place your mouse cursor before the “http” of your current URL, type http://www.roohit.com/, and then press enter. The Roohit site is loaded transparently with the site you were on displayed as normal but with a control panel.
An alternative is to add the Roohit bookmarklet (a fragment of JavaScript that is saved as a bookmark) which invokes the URL modification and reloading automatically.
Roohit also offers a Web site button to enable your users to highlight your content and a Web widget that will display your clips on your Web site.
This control panel offers a choice of highlighting colors and various other options for highlighted content and your cursor is turned into a highlighting marker icon. You can then click and drag across any text and it will be saved to the Roohit site along with the rest of the page.
Roohit knows which clips are yours through a cookie that identifies your PC but, of course, should that cookie get deleted you’ll lose access to your clips. The solution is to use the feature displayed when you aren’t known to Roohit – you establish your identity by logging into one of the major Web mail services through Roohit (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are currently supported).
Note that Roohit doesn’t keep your password but merely tags your saved clips with your e-mail identity (this is actually a very clever technique for authenticating users without having to build your own account management system).
The fact that Roohit saves the whole page along with the clip is important because even if the Web site changes the context of the clip is maintained. Whether Roohit is going to run into copyright issues over this remains to be seen.
There is a downside to this page saving however: Roohit doesn’t save the graphics and embedded content (such as Flash movies) on the page, just the HTML and the related style sheets. This means that when an original page changes and loses, for example, an image the context of the saved text in terms of order will be correct. That said, the page layout may get corrupted due to the missing items that in and of themselves control the size of things like table cells.
An interesting social networking feature of the Instant Web Highlighter is that through the control panel you can also enable the display of markup other people have done to the page you are on.
Another problem for Roohit is that when the Instant Highlighter service is engaged some sites don’t like the result. For example, both Blogger and The New York Times display their 404 messages when loaded via Roohit. In the case of my own site, gibbs.com, Roohit somehow interferes with the URL causing my ASP routing script that redirects aliased domains to subdirectories to fail.
Through the Roohit control panel you can e-mail clips to other people, jump to the index of your saved clips on the Roohit site, and load new pages. The Roohit control panel – which is actually rather unattractive – can be reduced to either a mini or an even smaller micro version but in all sizes case the control panel can’t be moved to another location other than the top right hand of the browser page.
Roohit is different. It uses techniques that I haven’t seen before and has a clever architecture but it needs a lot more polishing in terms of getting rid of bugs and improving the look and feel of its interface. Conclusion: Roohit is worth keeping an eye on.
